Creative rummage

We rely on maps to navigate earthly and celestial terrain, and I feel grounded, in control somehow, when I am pulled into a fabulous map. Oh here I am! There I will go! And then there are maps for our internal landscapes and methods we call on to steer through spiritual terrain. Mine help preserve sanity and joy—and trek through heartbreak and confusion. But they were falling short of guiding me through my own brand of American angst.

Our nation is, without question, an angry and divided one. This state of affairs scares me as mother, and as an American, but I am coping by thinking a great deal about rage --how to diffuse it in my own life, and in my broader community. But sometimes you stumble onto it like a landmine, and it takes a long time to piece yourself together.

Years ago I taught a class at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I was ungainly and pregnant, and far enough along that I was just about to lose my flight privileges. I remember being cold in that raw April and staying alone in a spooky cabin. But what I recall the most is my first encounter with a certain kind of rage from a complete stranger. There was a timid young man named Stephen in my class who wanted to tackle my assigned still life with a fresh perspective. I suggested he “blow up” a component of the still life , in this case a gourd, and paint it. He was delighted by this one simple exercise in abstraction and immersed himself in painting for the rest of the week.

When his mother came to see the student show at the end of the week, she took one look at his painting and stomped over to me. She said: “This is crap. You cannot tell this is a gourd. How can I hang this on our wall? What kind of teacher are you? You taught him nothing!” She was shaking with fury, and as the adrenaline and fear swept through me, I grew a little frightened for my safety --and my unborn daughter’s. I tried to explain my approach, but I might as well have been talking to a windy Lake Michigan -- she refused to even look at me. She turned, swearing, and went to get her money back--or so she said. Her gentle son gathered his things, head down, and slunk away after her.

Although the mother’s reaction was extreme and loony, I am still startled by the anxiety, and occasional hostility, that abstraction can produce. While the high end art world has long embraced and cultivated every kind of expression, there is still a disconnect and a constant need for better education about art, process and art history in our schools, in our communities. We naturally tend to pull away from what we don’t immediately know, or don’t visually recognize as an object. It’s safer to choose from known images, from landscapes to still lifes. You don’t have to explain that cow in the pasture or the bird or the bowl of fruit. Abstraction has a spectral range --, from the abstracted, to the thoroughly abstract to the purely conceptual. Without a narrative, and subsequent education, people will fret about abstract painters and their work -- what if they are tricksters who are taking some kind of shortcut and flipping the viewer off?

My own work moves between representational and abstraction, but I still field apprehensive questions, even at my age and at my stage in my career. “Why don’t you paint trees, or faces, or mountains?” “How long did this take?” Or “I don’t get it.” One internet critic even told me I painted like a child and that I was a fraud. These encounters do knock you back on your heels for a moment, or an hour, or maybe a day. But I have finally learned to act, not react (thanks to my husband’s influence), by asking my own questions of the viewer, and by offering my backstory if the title and artist statement do not resonate. For the most part, this simple strategy works for maneuvering all kinds of terrain. John Cheever put it best:

I think I can conclude that life, as it passes before our eyes is a creative force -- that one thing is put usefully upon another -- that what we lose in one exchange is more than replenished by the next--that it is only us, only our pitiful misunderstanding that makes for crookedness, darkness and anger.

Just living is not enough....one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. Hans Christian Andersen

Papaver Orientalis -- The Mojo Garden

The gardening catalogues are clogging up our post box and I am daydreaming about my gardening future. I’m beginning to feel the earth move under my feet, even through a foot of snow.

Lupine in the Mojo Garden

Conservation InternationaI's "I need nature" campaign is a household hit, and our kids love the celebrity takes on various "personalities" of our natural world. The film shorts make a compelling reason for why we all should be conservationists.

Monarda in the Mojo Garden

My favorite features Lupita Nyongo and makes me long for my flowers, the Mojo Garden (our garden) and summer. You can find Lupita as flower below, but don’t miss PenelopeCruz as water either.

And then she asked why all serious gardeners, the ones who push beyond a basic marigold border, aren’t considered eco-artists. She pointed out that gardeners have a singular understanding of the climate crisis because they take note of subtle and dramatic changes in the weather, wildlife patterns, and soil.

In the early seventies, my father accepted a post in the Nixon administration to represent the United States as its ambassador to El Salvador, and my siblings and I moved to a new country and a bilingual school. Half the day was in Spanish, the other in English. My father insisted that I would be fluent in Spanish in no time. Instead, I got a crash course in bullying.

I believe in portals. The kinds that don’t require passwords, only presence. There are famous portals like the ones in the Narnia Chronicles or the Harry Potter series. I have portals of my own: my garden is one and Independence Pass is another.

I fit one artist stereotype quite well — I was never a math star. Far from it. I stumbled through pre-calculus and closed the door and assumed I would always bellyflop when it came to mathematics. When I took my place in the world of practical numbers -one fleshed out in spreadsheets, budgets, and investment data - I realized I liked looking for patterns within the numbers and that…